. . .
|
Chapter 3
"POETRY IS VISION" - "VISION IS LOVE"
According to Rexroth's theory and practice, poetry is vision.
Poets and critics have often used this term carelessly, but in Rexroth's
work "vision" has several definite meanings that cohere in his
organic philosophy of literature-in-community.
"Vision," referring to phases of a creative process of
consciousness, sometimes means contemplation, in which the poet
communed with nature and those he loved, and in which he
periodically had oceanic, ecstatic experiences of realization,
illumination, or enlightenment. At these times, sensation, perception,
thinking, and feeling, especially love, were clarified, purified, and
radically expanded; so he claimed that "vision is love." [1]
As experience became intellectualized, vision came to mean the act of
philosophizing and also the world-view projected by philosophizing;
so vision is both sensuous and abstract, non-verbal and literary,
personal and transpersonal. Rexroth's world vision is both
conservative in reviving and uniquely synthesizing Hebraic-Christian,
Classical, Buddhist, and modern traditions of spiritual realization, and
revolutionary in its vigorous denunciation of the prevailing
impersonality, oppression, and alienation of modern society,
technology, and culture, which he believed could be replace by a
humane and enlightened way of life. As his personal experiences
were expressed in poetry, vision became the act of poetic
communication, evolving from interpersonal communion and
recreating community. His vision is uniquely his, yet it is also
universal in scope and validity because it realizes the person in world
community. Rexroth's world vision reveals his, and our, "Being-in-
the-World," as Heidegger put it.
"Poetry is vision," Rexroth asserts in "Poetry, Regeneration,
and D. H. Lawrence," "the pure act of sensual communion and
contemplation." [2] Does he mean all poetry, or the best of it?
Obviously his idea is normative rather than descriptive, characterizing
the poetry of Lawrence, Yeats, Blake, Whitman, poetry that he
translated by Tu Fu, Li Ch'ing Chao, Sappho, Dante, and his own. He
means by "vision" the essence of poetry, the quality that makes it
true poetry, the quality often ignored by critics who emphasize form,
structure, construction, or technique at the expense of imagination, or
identify artifice as poetry itself. Craftsmanship is important in
Rexroth's own poetry and all poetry that he values, but as a means to
an end rather than as an end in itself. What, in his opinion, does
poetry at its best communicate? Visionary experience: vision itself.
And what is that?
He defines poetic vision as an act, a dynamic transformation of
experience rather than as passive reflection; and it is a pure act, unlike
impure acts of ordinary experience that lack unifying aesthetic
concentration. There may be a suggestion that poetry is a purifying
act, as in Aristotle's idea of catharsis; but in Rexroth's view poetry
does more than purge impure emotions, for communion implies that
poetry is an intimate experience of mutuality, a sacramental act of
commemoration in which we may be mystically united with others
and perhaps with reality as a whole. Such communion is sensual,
rendered imagistically and symbolically; and delightful sounds of
language indicated by the artistry of calligraphy or typography evoke
the imagined world of the poem. So poetry is a contemplative act,
arising in deep, clear, open-minded, loving awareness. The text and
form of the poem reveal the visionary act which is the essential
poetry.
Rexroth shows that vision is organic consciousness,
sympathetic, clear, and steady, communing, communicating, realizing
the many in the one, the one in the many, the universality of each
being. In vision, the observer is united with the observed, the poet
communes directly with other beings, and all beings interact in
community which extends through galaxies and transpersonal
dimensions of mind that he called Buddha-worlds. Such thinking
must be experienced in poetry itself, not abstracted from it as
doctrine, just as in understanding music we must experience music
musically.
Visionary experience--essentially formless--often takes form;
but a vision is not vision, as Rexroth carefully points out in The
Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart: "visions are/The measure
of the defect/Of vision." [3] Because true vision is clarified
interpersonal consciousness, not hallucination, dream, or fantasy,
Rexroth's poetics is opposed to Surrealism and Dada, as shown in his
cubist poem, "Fundamental Disagreement with Two
Contemporaries," which alludes to Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton.
[4] Similarly, Rexroth refused to identify true vision with the
amoral drug highs of the Beat Generation, for he doubted that Allen
Ginsberg's and Jack Kerouac's frantic searches for vision in
Howl and On the Road got them beyond nihilistic
confusion. According to Rexroth, vision is habitual clear-mindedness:
The illuminated live
Always in light and so do
Not know it is there as fishes
Do not know they live in water. [5]
. . .
St. John of the Cross said it,
The desire for vision is
The sin of gluttony. [6]
"The True Person"
Rexroth insisted that vision is personal, the experience of a
"true person" in community. "The universalization of the human
soul, the creation of the true person," was evident in the life of Albert
Schweitzer, for example. [7] Such a person is neither merely a
self-made man, nor someone who simply loses himself in work or
meditation. Such a person loses ego, but not the whole person, which
is realized only in loving, creative interaction with others. Rexroth
takes himself for granted as an integral person instead of condemning
himself as a sinner or striving to change himself into someone else.
Rexroth's personalism is aesthetic as well as ethical and
psychological. Because vision is personal, he typically stands
undisguised in his poetry and prose instead of concealing himself
behind an impersonal literary construction, a mask, like Yeats, or an
"objective correlative," like Eliot in accordance with the New
Criticism. Rexroth's poetic theory and most of his practice challenge
the impersonality of much modernist literature and criticism,
particularly as Eliot dogmatized in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent" about the necessity of the poet's losing his personality as he
learns to express not himself but his medium. Rexroth's "progress"
as poet was radically subversive of Eliot's principles, for Rexroth's
work was a continual revelation of personality, his own and the
personalities of the many poets from many cultures whose work he
translated after imaginatively conversing with them. Rexroth might
well have argued against James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus that the true
poet remains in his handiwork like a pantheistic spirit, instead of
invisibly behind it like the Roman Catholic God. Rexroth openly
participates in much of his poetry, excepting his plays, and even in
them the characters' tragic lives dramatize the poet's philosophical
personalism, which links each one with the fate of the human race, as
the Chorus proclaims near the end of Beyond the Mountains:
There are countless
Iphigenias marching to
Their deaths at this moment in all
The dust motes of the rising sun.
There are no things in the real
World. Only persons have being.
Things are perspectives on persons--
A mote of dust is a distant
Person seen with dusty interest. [8]
Communion: "Communication Raised to the Highest Power"
Rexroth's poetry typically arises out of pre-verbal, pre-
conceptual, visionary experiences similar to those described in the
sutras and tantras, D. T. Suzuki's Zen writings, William James'
Varieties of Religious Experience, Martin Buber's I and
Thou, Jacob Boehme's The Signature of All Things,
George Fox's Journals, Vedanta, and other sources referred to
throughout his work; but he remained sceptical of dogmatic and
theoretical explanations, especially those depending upon an Absolute
or a supernatural god. His sense that "The Holy is in the heap of dust-
-it is the heap of dust" [9] resembles the Quaker Inner Light,
Blake's "Heaven in a wild flower," the emptiness of the Buddha-
nature, but such an intuition cannot be forced into a dogmatic system,
for such experience can only be intimated artistically, not defined
scientifically.
Rexroth's "perfect communion with others" [10] was often
erotic, but at the same time it transcended physical attraction. In his
many love poems, the women are spiritual beings, sometimes human,
sometimes divine, as in the seventeenth poem of The Silver
Swan, when, before dawn in Japan, he imagines a nude girl taking
form from the light of the Morning Star: "her/Body flows into mine,
each/Corpuscle of light merges/With a corpuscle of blood or flesh."
[11] But the erotic mysticism that permeates his poetry
is but one kind of communion and, as we learn from his introduction
to The Phoenix and the Tortoise, it is but a phase in the
development of the person out of despair, through sacramental
marriage, to a realization of universal responsibility. [12] With
this responsibility, a person acts with compassionate consciousness of
world community. So communion of two persons in the "mutual
being" of love entails, by implication, responsibility for all beings in
universal community; for each is inseparable from all.
In regarding poetry as vision, Rexroth meant that it arises out of
contemplation and communion to become communication and so was
not complete as merely private experience. So he can also, without
contradiction, say that poetry is "interpersonal communication raised
to the highest power." [13] "It communicates the most intense
experiences of very highly developed sensibilities," he wrote in one
of his most important essays on aesthetics, "Unacknowledged
Legislators and Art pour Art," in which he emphasized the personal
origin of poetry and its communication not predominantly of feeling
or thought, but of whole experiences: "A love poem is an act of
communication of love, like a kiss."14 Such communication has a
strong ethical value, strangely reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's
"criticism of life." In Rexroth's words, poetry is a "symbolic
criticism of values." [15] So love poems and nature poems
become criticisms of a dehumanized culture based on the alienation
of people from one another, from their own nature, and from the
universe as a whole. But such moral and intellectual functions of
poetry are never separated from its emotional, psychological,
sensuous, and spiritual aspects, for it "widens and deepens and
sharpens the sensibility..." [16]
Rexroth felt that Chinese and Japanese poetry often
communicates experiences of such "highly developed sensibilities"
more directly and purely than most European poetry because "Most
poetry in the Western world is more or less corrupted with rhetoric
and manipulation... with program and exposition, and the actual
poetry, the living speech of person to person, has been a by product."
[17] This extraordinary statement, which is certainly debatable,
may suggest one reason for Rexroth's turn from cubism, which was
prevalent in his theory and practice of poetry as well as painting
between the World Wars, to the poetry of natural speech, which
became his predominant mode from The Phoenix and the
Tortoise (1944) on. Also, terms from European and American
philosophy and historical struggles, so prominant in his poetry before
The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967), were used
less often as oriental and especially Buddhist themes and imagery
filled his poetry and translations.
In Rexroth's view, communication rests upon some
preunderstanding from communion and community. A message is not
transmitted mechanically by means of a text, from sender to receiver;
rather, meaning evolves from pre-established community, some kind
of mutual existence and mutual interest. Out of I-Thou, meaning
evolves. Unless we share consciousness, we can understand nothing.
True communication, through poetry and other arts, helps us realize
mutual being.
"The Craft Is the Vision and the Vision Is the Craft"
In emphasizing vision, Rexroth may seem to underplay skill;
but in fact he was a meticulous craftsman in both poetry and prose,
and his criticism of literature places a high premium on artistic
technique, not as an end in itself as in aestheticism, but as a means of
communicating experience. He appreciated subtle forms and
techniques of many kinds of art such as action painting, progressive
jazz, and the Revolution of the Word that were often condemned as
obscure; but they moved him because of his sensitivity to
craftsmanship and his curiosity about its meaning. "Purposive
construction of any kind is a species of communication," he wrote,
"just as any kind of communication must be structured." [18] And
in successful visionary poetry such as Lawrence's Birds, Beasts, and
Flowers "the craft is the vision and the vision is the craft."
[19]
Rexroth's own craftsmanship is impressive, and his prosody
deserves a long study. He wrote some rhymed quatrains and limericks
as well as a few unpublished sonnets, but most of his poetry is in free
verse and in syllabic patterns that are intricately melodious: for
example, the nine-syllable lines of most of The Homestead Called
Damascus, the 7-8 syllable lines of most of The Dragon and
the Unicorn, The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, and of
parts of Beyond the Mountains, and the seven syllable lines of
many shorter poems such as "The Reflecting Trees of Being and Not
Being":
In my childhood when I first
Saw myself unfolded in
The triple mirrors, in my
Youth, when I pursued myself
Wandering on wandering
Nightbound roads like a roving
Masterless dog, when I met
Myself on sharp peaks of ice,
And tasted myself dissolved
In the lulling heavy sea,
In the talking night, in the
Spiraling stars, what did I
know? [20]
If this passage is read aloud so that the seven syllables of each
line are given equal duration, sound and meaning are fused with great
clarity and dignity. Syllabic verse seems eminently suited for
Rexroth's poetics of visionary communication in that it focusses
attention directly on sound's meaning, the sense of sense, with more
control than free verse because of regular line-lengths, whereas
rhymed and accentually metered verse divides attention between the
abstract sound system and the actual sound and meaning of language.
In transmitting experience with maximum directness, Rexroth did not
want the playful tension between abstract and actual patterns of
sound, which are appropriately enriching in other kinds of poetry. He
seems to have been influenced by syllabic verse in Japanese, Chinese,
and French, which he translated profusely, more than by
contemporary practitioners of syllabics in English such as W. H.
Auden, Marianne Moore, and Dylan Thomas. Why he chose to write
lines of certain length is not certain, but they feel normal in English,
in which we are accustomed to alternating lines in ballad stanzas of
eight syllables (not counting truncations and other frequent
variations) and in most poems before free verse, pentameter lines of
ten syllables: Rexroth seems to have discovered natural line-lengths
from seven to nine syllables without regular accentual patterns. The
seven-syllable lines (mixed with five-syllable lines) of Japanese haiku
and tanka also influenced his practice. The framework of seven
syllables, in this poem, allows for full freedom of speech, while at the
same time providing emphases at the ends and beginnings of lines--
"first," "Saw," "Youth," "myself," "Wandering" (repeated),
"Nightbound," "roving," "Masterless," "Myself," "ice,"
"dissolved," "sea," "Spiraling," "I," and "Know." There are also
profuse echoes from line to line, supporting the unrolling theme, in
parallelism indicated in the following diagram:
In my childhood
when I first/Saw myself
unfolded in/The triple mirrors,
in my/Youth,
when I pursued myself/
Wandering on wandering/
Nightbound roads
like a roving/Masterless dog,
when I met/Myself
on sharp peaks of ice,/
And tasted myself
dissolved/
In the lulling heavy sea,/
In the talking night,
In the/Spiraling stars,
what did I/Know?
This subtly constructed poem of cosmic vision continues with
his questioning what he knows, as he imagines his blood flowing out
to the nebulae and back. Losing himself in the vastness of the
universe, he knows only faces of other persons, mostly of his beloved,
beyond space and time. He explained how he deliberately patterned
vowels and consonents to enhance the melody of much of his verse, a
method that he seems to have learned in part from Japanese poetry:
Most of these poems are in syllabic lines. (Sometimes after the poem
is cast in syllabic lines it is broken up into cadences.) Against this is
counterpointed a rhythm primarily of quantity, secondarily of accent.
In addition, close attention is paid to the melodic line of the vowels
and to the evolution of consonants (p-b-k, m-r-l-y, etc.) In
most cases a melody was written at the time of the poem.
[21]
What is important here is that melody is inherent in the poem's
language, in the rise and fall of pitch in the spoken poem, rather than
being determined by an abstract form imposed upon natural speech.
Indeed, Rexroth's poetry is most often in the direct statement
and address of "natural numbers," in the normal grammar of actual
speech. Symbolism characterizes The Homestead Called
Damascus, his first long poem written between 1920 and 1925,
but this mode was then abandoned. A third mode, described by
Rexroth as cubism or objectivism, was practiced mostly between the
World Wars, with such work collected chiefly in the latter half of
In What Hour (1940) and The Art of Worldly Wisdom
(1940), though some also appears later.
The Vicarity of Symbolism
In his youth, Rexroth wrote symbolist poetry which evolved
into The Homestead Called Damascus, his first long
philosophical poem. This musical narrative of the traumatic quests of
two brothers is full of symbols and myths of decadence, sacrifice, and
fertility--a rambling home full of the bric-a-brac of imperialism;
dreams of Tammuz and Adonis, castrated; Persephone and a black
stripper promising libidinous-spiritual revitalization. The brothers
have vague, inconclusive, meandering metaphysical and theological
conversations and helpless fantasies about a beautiful Renaissance
maiden who occasionally rides past on a white horse. The poem
echoes Stevens, Yeats, Aiken, Proust, James, French symbolist poets,
anthropological scholars such as Frazer, Weston, Harrison, Cornford,
Murray, and the strongest influence of all, Eliot, whose The Waste
Land had enthused Rexroth until he realized that Eliot stood
against everything for which he was working for. [22] The style
of Homestead was not compatible with Rexroth's emerging
aesthetic theory and practice of cubism and later of direct utterance,
so he wrote nothing else like it and did not publish it for thirty years.
Moreover, symbolism, suggesting a transcendent Reality remote from
immediate experience, grew from a metaphysic opposite to his idea of
immanence, that the "Holy is the heap of dust" and is not symbolized
by it. Nevertheless, the poem is a remarkable achievement that
deserves to be honored for its own sake, for the sensuousness of its
sound, the complexity of its characters and their interactions, the
suggestiveness of its imagery, and its philosophical implications:
I know this is an ambivalent
Vicarity--who stands for who?
And this is the reality then--
This flesh, the flesh of this arm and I
Know how this flesh lies on this bone
Of this arm, this is reality--
I know. I ask nothing more of it.
These things are beautiful, these are
My sacraments and I ask no more. [23]
The Revolution of the Word: Cubism and Objectivism
Rexroth's cubist poetry and painting launched him into the
international avant-garde between the two World Wars, when the
Revolution of the Word was in full swing. [24] It was a
comprehensive revolution, not only of language and art, but also of
the mind and of life itself. Whereas symbolist poetry seemed to be a
language of aristocratic decadence, cubism appealed to his ambition
to reconstruct language along with everything else. His youthful,
elitist commitment to change the world was lifelong, though his
modes of writing changed. [25]
Rexroth's earliest cubist poems were written as early as 1920,
but were not published in little magazines from 1929 on and were not
collected until 1949, when they appeared in The Art of Worldly
Wisdom, including the long poem A Prolegomenon to a
Theodicy, along with short poems. Such writing was called
"objectivist," but he preferred to describe his work as cubist,
involving "the analysis of reality into simple units and the synthesis
of the work of art as a real parallel to experience," as in Eisenstein's
films, some of the poetry of Apollinaire, Cocteau, Cendrars,
MacOrlan, Deltier, Soupault, Cendrars, Aragon, Tzara, Eluard, and
especially Reverdy in France, Williams, Pound, Stein, Winters,
Arensberg, Lowenfels, and Zukofsky in America, songs of pre-
literate people such as American Indians, and of course cubist
painting. [26]
Rexroth vigorously and originally promoted the cubist aesthetic,
theoretically and practically, in his own paintings, poems, essays, and
translations from the French. His analytical mind was attracted to the
direct, definite reconstruction of experience as an art object, which he
distinguished from the dreamy suggestiveness of symbolism and
surrealism. "In the Memory of Andrée Rexroth," the
agonizing elegy opening The Art of Worldly Wisdom, is
Rexroth's cubism as its best, at once personal and objective:
is a question of mutual being
a question of congruence or
proximity a question of
a sudden passage in air beyond
a window a long controlled fall
of music... [27]
Rexroth's Introduction to Reverdy contains his strongest
defense of cubism, which as a young man he was sure would be the
future of American poetry: "Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of
the mind itself." [28] Such poetry, he claims, induces in the
reader 'Vertigo, rapture, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds,
shattered and refracted light, indefinite depth, weightlessness,
piercing odors and tastes, and synthesizing the sensations and affects,
an all-consuming clarity.' [29] This claim for such experience
which he called "visionary" and which a later genertion would call
"psychedelic" cannot be argued, but only tested in the actual,
immediate experience of reading cubist poetry--such as, for example,
the last section of "Andromeda Chained to Her Rock the Great
Nebula in Her Heart":
Eyes in moss
Salt in mouth
Stone in heart
An owl rings the changes of silence
Torn head
Crow's wings
Black eyeballs
Poison seeps through the parabolic sand
The rock on fire
Ice falls towards the sun [30]
Reading such a passage, I experience vertigo and some of the
extreme sense impressions described by Rexroth, but not, I regret to
say, an "all-consuming clarity," which more aptly characterizes the
poems of "natural numbers" rather than cubist poems. The
phenomena that he describes may be comparable to those of mystical
experiences; but he is careful to make a fundamental distinction
between religious experiences, which are "necessitated and
ultimate," and visionary poems, which are not. [31]
Poetry may communicate vision in the sense of communion, I-Thou,
without being itself a vision of transcendent being.
Why did Rexroth turn away from cubism after it had made him
internationally famous? In the 1953 preface to The Art of Worldly
Wisdom, he explains that because even some of his friends in the
Avant-garde did not comprehend his cubist poems, he decided to
reach a wider community of readers by writing very much as he
spoke, in normal syntax. Nevertheless, some cubist poems continued
to appear even in his late books, in the section called "Gödel's
Proof" at the outset of The Collected Shorter Poems, for
example. He never gave up on cubism, helping to revive it in essays
and translations of French poetry.
Though not much in favor today, Rexroth's cubist poetry
nevertheless shows his early artistic originality, his immense
intellectual power, and his contribution to a worldwide cultural
transformation that continues today in "language poetry" and other
manifestations. In practicing cubism, he analyzed and controlled the
elements of language in innovative ways that carried over to "natural
numbers," especially in startling juxtapositions of particulars of
experience and the phrasings of direct address. Whenever in later
years he returned to cubism in his poetry, translations, and essays, it
was a reminder that the Revolution of the Word and of Life had not
been extinguished, even during the repressiveness of the Cold War.
Dorothe Van Ghent and Rachelle K. Lerner have written
brilliantly about Rexroth's cubism, the latter relating his painting to
his cubist poetry and theory in her dissertation and a book in progress.
"Natural Numbers"--"Striving to Write the Way I Talk"
Rexroth's most characteristic, successful, and popular mode of
poetic communication might be called "natural numbers," a term
used in the title of one of his books, referring to poetry that
stylistically approximates, in syntax and diction, actual speech of
person to person. From about 1920 on he wrote translations from
Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Latin in this mode, starting with
translations of Sappho:
...about the clear water
the wind sounds through sprays
of apple, and from the quivering leaves
slumber pours down... [32]
The classical directness and clarity of ancient poetry, especially of
Japanese tanka, mastered through the art of translation, infused his
original poems as well. Among the earliest of these is the sequence
for Leslie Smith entitled "The Thin Edge of Your Pride," dated 1922-
26, containing such perfect imagist passages as:
After an hour the mild
Confusion of snow
Amongst the lamplights
Has softened and subdued
The nervous lines of bare
Branches etched against
The chill twilight. [33]
Rexroth had become famous as a cubist before the poems in
"natural numbers" began appearing in periodicals in the mid-1930's.
He speaks through the "natural" poems as if a listener is present, so
the poems are intense, dramatic speech-acts, typically expressing love
or friendship, often grief, sometimes outrage and social protest. Even
if a listener does not seem to be present in poems of meditation and
lone reminiscence, the voice remains so intimate that the reader
becomes Rexroth's confidant. In autobiographical poems such as "A
Living Pearl" and contemplative poems in the mountains such as
"Lyell's Hypothesis Again" and "Toward an Organic Philosophy,"
[34] the words draw us towards him as if we are sitting
beside a campfire under the stars, listening to him talk.
Direct address is also evident in the revolutionary rhetoric of the
poems in the first half of In What Hour, the anti-war
memorial for Dylan Thomas called "Thou Shalt Not Kill," the ethical
speculations of The Dragon and the Unicorn, and the
dramatic tetralogy Beyond the Mountains, stylistically
influenced by Japanese Noh drama. "I have spent my life striving to
write the way I talk," Rexroth wrote, [35] and his public
readings convincingly demonstrated the relationship between his
writing and speaking. Even when technical terms from the sciences,
philosophy, politics, and theology enter his prose and poetry, along
with literary and historical allusions from the major civilizations,
there is a natural flow of living speech, an acceptance of the Tao, the
way things naturally are, except in the symbolist and cubist poems, in
which language has been willfully, sometimes forcefully,
reconstructed. "Natural numbers" became the appropriate mode for
the Buddhist worldview that grew in importance in Rexroth's work
from World War II on, for in Buddhism, the will and ego turn out to
be illusions floating in calm, compassionate contemplation.
"Actual Poetry Is the Living Speech of Person to Person"
The evolution of Rexroth's chief poetic mode, "natural
numbers," from lyrical, elegiac, and satirical to dramatic forms,
supported and was supported by his idea that "actual poetry is the
living speech of person to person." [36] His friend William
Carlos Williams, with whom he had many affinities, believed that
"you have no other speech than poetry," [37] and
Whitman had heard America singing in its common speech. Rexroth
thought that poems are derived from the poetic flow of living speech,
that poems are realized orally, that texts like scores of music are
indications of oral performance, an art which he practiced and
promoted extensively long before readings became commonplace.
Though this process, poetry unites poet and audience in community.
This approach counteracts the pedantic idea that poetry is
fundamentally on the page or in the mind as an object of impersonal,
analytical study, or that poetry is some kind of artificially constructed
arrangement of words that no one would ever conceivably say to
another. For Rexroth, true poetry realizes the spiritual union of Martin
Buber's I-Thou. [38]
Not all actual speech can be poetry, or course, for much talk is
thoroughly debased; but poetry cannot be poetry unless it is vital
communication from sensibility to sensibility, actualized in speech
from one to another. The idea would have been readily accepted by
the ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Japanese, among others who thought
of poetry as song that unites performers and audience.
When Rexroth implies that poetic communication depends on
sensibility, he seems dependent on Wordsworth, who defined a poet
as "a man speaking to men--a man, it is true, endowed with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater
knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are
supposed to be common among mankind." [39] Despite this
fundamental agreement about the poet's nature and function,
however, there are differences of emphasis; for whereas sensibility
for Wordsworth is innately endowed, for Rexroth it can be developed
to the qualitative magnitude necessary for true poetry: poets may be
made as well as born.
Poetry As Communal Sacrament
According to Rexroth, poetry originates in personal vision
(communion with others), takes form in the direct communication of
living speech, person to person, and functions sacramentally in
community. In "American Indian Songs" he shows how song, and art
generally, unite the individual to society and nature. [40]
People alienated from nature, from each other, and from themselves,
as most people are in modern secular, industrial or post-industrial
society, cannot imagine living organically; so poetry has a
revolutionary function in reminding us that we do live in nature, in
some kind of community, invaded and broken though it may be by
technological forces that divide us from each other. In An
Autobiographical Novel Rexroth wrote eloquently about the
sacramental activities of organic societies:
In the rites of passage--the fundamental activities and relationships of
life--birth, death, sexual intercourse, eating, drinking, choosing a
vocation, adolescence, mortal illness--life at its important moments is
ennobled by the ceremonious introduction of transcendence: the
universe is focused on the event in a Mass or ceremony that is itself a
kind of dance and a work of art. [41]
Rexroth centered on his own rites of passage and those of his
family: his birth, sexual and intellectual awakenings of adolescence,
his parents' illnesses and deaths, hopes for a religious vocation that
climaxed during a retreat in an Anglo-Catholic monastery, and his
lifelong commitment to the vocations of poet, artist, and
revolutionary. [42] He wrote to and about his children and
their growing awareness of the universe in "The Lights in the Sky
Are Stars," "Mary and the Seasons," "Xmas Coming," and many
other poems. [43] He heartrendingly commemorated his
mother in two elegies and his first wife Andrée in three
elegies. [44] Some of his most intensely erotic
poems are the Marichiko poems. 45 Eating and drinking are celebrated
in several appetizing passages in The Dragon and the
Unicorn [46] and elsewhere. And countless
nature poems center on ritualistic observations of seasonal cycles and
the motions of heavenly bodies. Of all rites of passage, Rexroth
seems to have been most preoccupied with marriage, for his spiritual
aim was to move "from abandon to erotic mysticism, from erotic
mysticism to the ethical mysticism of sacramental marriage, thence to
the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility..."
[47]
In sacramental marriage as distinct from a merely legal bond,
the I-Thou of interpersonal communion (the original vision of poetry)
is realized and celebrated as the center of community, uniting each
person with humanity as a whole, in universal responsibility. The
union of the loving couple is the nexus of the mystical union of all.
The theme is prominent in The Phoenix and the Tortoise, the
Marichiko poems, and many others.
Rexroth's poetry is typically sacramental whether it celebrates
erotic and marital union or processes of nature, humanistic revolts for
freedom, or visionary creations. His poetry as a whole transmits a
boundless reverence for life and love of humanity.
Most comprehensively of all the shorter poems "A Letter to
William Carlos Williams" reveals Rexroth's visionary poetics, his
commitment to poetry as interpersonal communion, communication
of vision, and communal sacrament. In intimate direct address,
Rexroth compares Williams to St. Francis, Brother Juniper, and
Yeats' Fool of wisdom and beauty. He praises Williams' quiet
affection for red wheelbarrows, cold plums, Queen Anne's lace, his
stillness like that of George Fox and Christ, from which the authentic
speech of poetry emerged. Then Rexroth prophesies that a young
woman, walking one day in a utopian landscape by "the lucid
Williams River," will tell her children that it used to be the polluted
Passaic in the Dark Ages. Just as the river flows through nature,
Williams' veins, Rexroth's speech, history, the imagined woman and
her children, as well as those of us who read the poem--flowing like
the Tao, the Way of Lao Tzu--so all participate in the universal
community of all beings, revealed in poetry:
And that is what a poet
Is, children, one who creates
Sacramental relationships
That last always. [48]
Go to the next chapter
Go to the contents page
Copyright © 2000 by Morgan Gibson
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry
|
....
|